There are lots of tools for using twitter, some for tweeting and scheduling tweets, some add greatly to existing twitter functionality, others help you manage your followers, and some focus on data visualisation based on twitter’s data.

In generally they are using twitter’s API to pull publicly available data from twitter and presenting it to you in more useful ways. There are loads of tools out there that are lots of fun to play with, in researching this I found this list of 93 free (or freemium) tools. and this list of 21 must-have tools for twitter. Be warned though, things change quickly in the twitterverse and some tools may already be dead (RIP Storify).

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years I’ve been using twitter and these are my favourites. PS They’re all free, or have free versions.

1 Tools for using Twitter

I am a fan of TweetDeck, I can manage multiple accounts from it, across multiple devices, and it provides multiple columns which is handy for specific searches and for any tweetchats that you join.

It will also let me schedule tweets. There are social media experts out there who say you shouldn’t schedule tweets, and there are examples where it has gone wrong. But it’s a practical way of managing your account.

Twitter now allows scheduling from company accounts, and their are other tools out there, Hootsuite is probably the most popular and it has the added advantage of giving you some analytics, although the most interesting data is only available for paid accounts. (See the advantages and disadvantages of Hootsuite).

2 Analysing Twitter

I use twitter’s own analytics tool, just go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ while you’re logged in to twitter and you’ll see basic analytics data for your twitter account.

Twitter’s analytics tool provides decent reports on your follower growth, overall tweet performance, and performance per tweet. The downside is that only 5 months of data are held, if you want to use more you need to download your data regularly. Oh yeah, it’s free.

FollowerWonk works on a freemium model but gives in depth analysis of your followers and who you follow, it has all sorts of neat tricks from suggesting the best time to tweet, to the “Social Authority” of your followers, to their activity.

This graph shows when my followers are most active – it makes sense to tweet more in periods of high activity.

3 Managing Followers

I use Status Brew to track my followers. I’ll generally follow back if the account looks like a real person who is tweeting genuine content, this tool helps me identify fake or inactive accounts. It also shows me who has followed or unfollowed me recently and lets me follow back (or unfollow) from within their application. Manage Filter offers similar options. Both companies work on a freemium model, for individual use the free tools are already pretty helpful.

There’s another tool around that will validate followers for you called truetwit. I haven’t used it but have been asked to validate my account by people who are using it. Most days I only get a few new followers so it’s easy enough to validate them myself, but I can imagine for those on very popular accounts who want to ensure their followers are real, this would be a time saver.

4 Visualising Data From Twitter

MentionMapp, shows you the relationship between hashtags and people. I’ve used this to find relevant hashtags for posts, and to find people who are currently tweeting about a subject, the presentation is dynamic, and you can click on any hashtag or person and the graph rebuilds.

One Million Tweet Map shows you local clusters or a heat map of where subjects are being discussed based on a hashtag search.

5 Hashtag This

If you want to know the trending hashtags around the world Trends24 lists them all with a national and city breakdown. Just for fun I made a comparison of what LA and NYC are tweeting about. Apparently there’s a thing called The Bachelor that’s the most interesting.

6 In App Tools

There are a few things you can do on the twitter app that you can’t do in the web version of Twitter.

Tweet Thread

Twitter was tricky to use for long form conversations in it’s original incarnation. Each tweet was only 140 characters and that included hashtags and URLs, writing tweets was almost an art form. It’s improved the character count to 280 which excludes hashtags and links. But still people needed more and came up with a work around, breaking your long story into a tweetstorm, a series of tweets, and using a numbering convention to help the reader; (1/4) at the end of a tweet indicated that this was the first of a four tweet series.

Last year Twitter introduced threading and you can just add a tweet to thread and they will be presented together. Much easier for the reader. This is only available on the phone apps at this stage and it’s really easy to use.

Bookmarks

The latest feature rolled out from Twitter is a real bookmark option, you are now able to save tweets to read later in a private list. There’s now a share button below each tweet, clicking on it reveals a short menu, click on “Add Tweet to Bookmarks”.

You can find your bookmarks saved under your profile and all bookmarks will be there. They’re not visible on the desktop version, yet.

I’ve got one more post in this series – around etiquette and things that can go wrong in Twitter. I’ll publish that next Tuesday.

Whew, we made it. It’s the end of a challenging year for me, but looking back some pretty cool things happened.

This is the season of lists, a quick search for best of 2015 on Google gives me “about 9,020,000,000 results” in less than a minute, which is more than on per person for the entire world. They range from the sensible Best Tech of 2015 from Mashable to Viral Videos of the Year from Buzzfeed. So rather than add to that I’m going to highlight things that struck me during the year.

In the News

Much of the news this year has been tough, frightening, even gruelling. Some amazing things happened as well, sometimes coming out of disaster. Following the devastating earthquake in Nepal, for example, geeks banded together to map the disaster and support rescues.

Meanwhile Anonymous have taken on ISIS; masked activists are taking on real world evil using a virtual medium is a tale that sounds more Hollywood than reality and yet here we are.

In more strange news, the British public has petitioned their parliament to ban Trump from entering the UK based on what they term “hate speech”. At the time of writing more than half a million people had signed the petition, easily exceeding the 10,000 threshold needed to force a discussion in parliament.

Best Hashtags of 2015

Ireland voted to make gay marriage legal in May, with many young people travelling back to Ireland in order to cast their vote in the #HomeToVote campaign.

Following the Paris attacks in January and in November the world showed its solidarity with France, by lighting up national monuments with the French Tricoleur. Despite the seriousness of the events and the sorrow of so many, the Belgians maintained their sense of surreal humour in the response to the police lockdown of Brussels in which people were asked not to disclose police activity on social media. They posted cat pictures, under the hashtag #BrusselsLockdown, scroll down to see how the police responded.

On a lighter note, a festive hashtag brought out the best and worst of literary puns.

Biggest Social Media Fail

Surprisingly some companies still haven’t grasped that there are risks as well as benefits to using social media, or that there are ways to test or limit those risks. Here are some of the biggest fails of 2015.

(1) Starbucks launch #RaceTogether

The intention behind this was probably good, working towards better race relations in a divided society where #BlackLivesMatter campaigns were under way. But the idea of discussing race issues while you get your coffee didn’t resonate with customers and the reaction was swift and harsh, the campaign was soon withdrawn.

(2) Woolworths tries to hijack Anzac Day

For those not from Australia or New Zealand, Anzac day is the day we remember those who died in wars. It’s taken seriously and the name “Anzac”, which stands for Australia New Zealand Army Core, is a protected term.

So when a supermarket chain tried to use it in a campaign it did not go well. There was significant backlash on social media, with abuse of the “meme generator” they’d installed on their site, followed by a request from the Veteran’s organisation to end the campaign.

(3) SeaWorld and their #AskSeaWorld campaign

If your company has a reputation issue then offering an “ask anything” opportunity on social media is a Bad Idea.

SeaWorld, or their social media agency, didn’t agree with that statement and launched a #AskSeaWorld campaign. The response was predictable;

SeaWorld win biggest social media fail of the year, not just because of the poorly thought out strategy but because when the inevitable backlash started their reaction was to label people as trolls and posted responses such as “Jacking hashtags is so 2014. #bewareoftrolls “. Not cool.

Big Moments

The end of Google, or rather the end of Google as we know it. Alphabet was born, as an corporate holding company allowing them to be recognised for more than their search/advertising industry.

Hoverboards became a thing in the “future” specified in Back to the Future, and we all wanted one. Then some of them caught fire.

Best book of 2015

Best book of 2015 (as in that’s when I read it) was Creativity Inc, by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. It’s a breath of fresh air, with inspiring discussions about business and leadership, a fascinating glimpse into the workings of arguably the world’s most creative company, and there are generous dots of humour. It’s so good I messaged a friend quotes from it until he bought his own copy. I will review it more fully in the New Year.

Heros of 2015

The people on the island of Lesvos who have put their lives on hold to pull people out of the ocean. Saving lives every day despite dropping temperatures. The politics around the Syrian crisis are messy and complex, but these people have got to the crux of the matter; the people are coming and they are dying.

If you can spare a donation there’s one organisation, Proactiva Open Arms, that is totally donation funded, started by a bunch of guys from Spain, and you can donate online.

Personal High Points

This was a strangely good year for travel; In my last job I met with colleagues from around the world visiting Dubai and Johannesburg for the first time. I also enjoyed some memorable personal travel; I spent time with my family, and helped my mum achieve a lifetime dream of watching a grand slam tennis tournament. In September I made it to Milan to see the World Expo, I was lucky enough to get VIP treatment there and got to see a lot in just three days. I headed to Dublin for the WebSummit, which is a sort of geek heaven. And to finish the year I rocked up to Vienna to meet up with friends from around the world for a sort of “Un-Christmas” celebration.

A great mix of travelling for family, for pleasure, for work and for learning. I’d like to have more of that in 2016!

This is my last post for the year, thank you for all the feedback, comments, and tweets we’ve shared this year. See you next year!